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Vulnerability or Suffering

It seems that I have been conditioned to avoid feeling vulnerable. Wanting to avoid pain and shield myself from it seems to be natural learning—and, at the same time completely not possible, because in my habitual reaction to close, guard and protect myself against pain, I also block out the light that reflects from it. So there is a conditioned fear that arises as the boundaries that I have built around the heart to protect myself from feeling pain, discomfort, and hurt are threatened. The reaction to prop those boundaries is in fact a chain that keeps me tethered to it, disallowing feelings of the opposites—joy, love and passion.

If I am able to witness and be with this fear and the energy of self that it is arising out of , I am enabled to experience it in a different way, to realize a potential for opening to a deeper seeing. In this experience of opening there’s a seeing of the fear that is the stimulus for adopting this superficial and familiar pattern aimed at alleviating and stabilizing and in turn to be with the vulnerability in a more intimate way. To learn to share my weakness is to make myself vulnerable; to make myself vulnerable is to show strength.

In some ways, suffering is a result of being stuck in this traditional, habitual pattern of experiencing and fearful reaction to vulnerability. Only in embracing our true nature, at our deepest core level, as emotional, vulnerable, and feeling beings are we able to tap our resilient inner strength.

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3 thoughts on “Vulnerability or Suffering”

One meaning of faith which is important to me is the willingness to be vulnerable – to throw myself on the mercy of the world so to speak. If we are to expose our soft white underbelly we have to accept that it is a gamble. Someone may attack us in our vulnerability. But there is a power that comes from walking into that situation willingly. There is no way to avoid being hurt altogether, but there is strength that comes from facing our fears rather than being controlled by them.

Yes and learning to recognize the futility of my traditional reaction to feeling vulnerable has not come easy. Excepting that gamble as you say it , seems to involve an element of something we have not known, possibly awareness, grace or something such as this. I’m not completely sure.

Yes, you know when you have it, but when I was younger I was at a loss how to find it. Maybe it is slowly built up through experience. The more experiments you make without anything terrible happening, the more confident you become. Not that I want to make myself as a supremely confident person, I’m just more confident than I was in the past.

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So we have to understand the existence, this life, our relationship to society. We have not only to understand our relationship with each other, with society, but to bring about a radical change in that relationship. And that is our responsibility. I do not think we feel this urgency. – Krishnamurti